FAIRBANKS — Fifty-six large, egg-shaped lead fishing sinkers were dropped one by one onto the aluminum pan deck of Garrett Shaw’s improvised watercraft before he called it quits.

“I know I could do more, but I don’t want to destroy it,” said the 11-year-old, who already had a wide lead for weight-bearing in the day’s engineering challenge.

But more importantly, Shaw wanted to take his sturdy catamaran-style boat, created with two-liter soda bottles, to the afternoon field trip — swimming at the Wescott Pool in North Pole.

Plastic recyclables coupled with children’s imaginations resulted in a motley assortment of surprisingly stable watercraft at the three-week summer program of the 21st Century Community Learning Center After School Programs at Anne Wien Elementary. A similar program ran simultaneously at North Pole Elementary.

FAIRBANKS — As kids attend camps, play outdoors and travel to see family during the summer months, some teachers are opting to stay in the classroom. Some of those teachers take the students’ seats to experience a different role.

In Fairbanks for the past two weeks, 28 teachers from around Alaska, 18 of them from Fairbanks, have stepped into the role of the student to learn how to incorporate arts in the classroom. The Arts and Writing Integration Institute is sponsored by the Alaska Arts Education Consortium and is in its second year in town.

“It’s a summer camp for adults,” said Dora Powell, a principal-teacher at the John Fredson School in Venetie. Three out of six of the school’s teachers came for the program, with an obligation to teach another teacher back home what they learned. When they’re all done, the entire faculty will know how to incorporate arts in their lessons.

“With a lot of the children, they need to have the kinesthetic” teaching to succeed, Powell said.

FAIRBANKS — Time is ticking for thousands of recent high school graduates who want to take advantage of Alaska’s ambitious new merit-based scholarship program.

The state believes thousands of students could be eligible this fall for the Alaska Performance Scholarship, a pet program of Gov. Sean Parnell that was passed by the Legislature in 2010. Those students are facing a cutoff date of June 30 to file a federal student aid form to begin the process.

The Legislature allocated $6 million to the Alaska Performance Scholarship to be divided among qualifying students. Depending on the number of applicants, top qualifying students could earn as much as $4,755 — the amount of a full-tuition scholarship at UA — while those with lower grades would earn smaller amounts.

The scholarship is open to Alaska high school graduates who complete a required number of high school core courses, have a grade-point average of 2.5 or more and get good scores on college-entrance tests. The scholarship must be used at an in-state institution.

FAIRBANKS — Erica Losee, 12, just finished the year at Woodriver Elementary School. As a sixth grader, she captured the attention of her teachers by setting a good example for others.

“Erica Losee has this incredible love of learning, exploration and a commitment to community,” teacher Karen Dullen said. “She is engaged, motivated and curious and challenges herself and her peers to have quality thoughts and questions in their final work.”

Dullen was impressed by a lot of Losee’s work, including an essay about Alaskan Native games and her writings on Newton’s Laws of Motion in her science notebook.

“Erica approaches all tasks with a ‘can do attitude’ and her demeanor is positive in all respects,” Dullen said.